I’m a Mac guy. I haven’t always been a Mac guy but I was forced to make the change just over 2 years ago when I went to work for a local company that was exclusively Mac. After about a 2 to 3 month adjustment period, I began to see the light. Now I love the Mac OSX, I love my Macbook Pro, and I can not imagine buying a PC ever again. Especially after the Vista laptop headaches that have plagued our home for over a year now (but that’s another story). Of course I keep a couple of old XP machines around for testing purposes, and I can run XP on my Macbook Pro using Parallels. But for everything I do for fun and most of what I do for work is on the Mac.
I get to work on a number of PHP sites with the traditional LAMP setup (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). So when I got my Macbook Pro, I needed to get everything up and running so I could get busy on my development projects quickly. I’ve always built out my LAMP manually because I’ve never found a tool that could just take care of everything for me the way I want it set up. That is until I found MAMP. I downloaded it, hit the Start Servers button and BAM, I’ve got my web server, database, and PHP all running. I love that it’s totally isolated from everything else too. Everything is stored in the /Applications/MAMP/ directory. I also do Ruby and Java development on the same machine, and the isolation of MAMP makes it real easy to keep things from conflicting.
If you’re doing any PHP work on a Mac, I strongly recommend MAMP. It’s a great tool. A big thanks and hat tip go to the dev team responsible.
Next time I’ll tell you what I had to do to get the slow queries log working with MAMP. It was a bit different from what I’m used to.
